Will/Should Metal3 improve gaming stability/performance on Intel macs or only Apple Silicon M-chips?

[TBoneMac]

Will/Should Metal3 improve gaming stability/performance on Intel macs or only Apple Silicon M-chips?

Or will it only improve games on newer macs? Can someone please explain in more detail to me what metal 3 means, and in particular if it matters for intel macs like the 2017 macbook pro 15 inch or the newer intel macbook pros like the 2019.

 

[OpenSource03]

Will/Should Metal3 improve gaming stability/performance on Intel macs or only Apple Silicon M-chips?

Or will it only improve games on newer macs? Can someone please explain in more detail to me what metal 3 means, and in particular if it matters for intel macs like the 2017 macbook pro 15 inch or the newer intel macbook pros like the 2019.

As far as I understand, it'll improve performance overall and equally on all devices supporting Metal3. I don't believe M1 or M2 have any kind of specific hardware that Metal3 is specifically designed for, as if they did, it would't take them so long to get it around.

Metal3 is focused on adding support for stuff that previously were not possible or had to be written as a workaround with huge performance loss, such as shaders, ray tracing, various buffers and atomic variables. More on that you can read here.

 

[Captain_Mac]

It's not an instantaneous performance gain just by updating to Ventura. Developers need to adopt Metal 3 in their apps. But the gains are for every device that support Metal 3, not only for Apple Silicon Macs.

 

[TBoneMac]

It's not an instantaneous performance gain just by updating to Ventura. Developers need to adopt Metal 3 in their apps. But the gains are for every device that support Metal 3, not only for Apple Silicon Macs.

So do you think games like Diablo 3 / World of warcraft / Starcraft 2 will get updated to Metal3. I think they use Metal2 right now.

 

[Captain_Mac]

So do you think games like Diablo 3 / World of warcraft / Starcraft 2 will get updated to Metal3. I think they use Metal2 right now.

I have no idea, it really is up to the developers in question. Or the developers of a game engine that's used by other developers for games.

 

[CMMChris]

It is highly unlikely there will be any Metal 3 updates to existing titles already utilizing Metal.

 

[OpenSource03]

So do you think games like Diablo 3 / World of warcraft / Starcraft 2 will get updated to Metal3. I think they use Metal2 right now.

Likely not. It took ages for games such as StarCraft to even implement metal support, so don’t imagine there’ll be metal 3 support any time soon… In any way, even with metal 3, don’t expect gaming on Mac to be any better than it was before. Even if developers bring Windows game to a Mac, it’s usually poorly ported and doesn’t utilize the potential of your hardware. Until Mac has at least 35+% of global market, it’ll never make sense for developers to write their games for it… And people usually buy Macs for work, and not gaming so yeah… I wouldn’t make that much of a big deal about metal 3 as of now… Of course, this only applies to big game studios and games you mentioned, smaller games are usually always making great ports for Macs, but those are the games only few people would actually want to play.

 

[eoblaed]

While development houses can be slow to adopt new technologies/APIs (eg. Metal 3). That said, the gap from no-Metal to Metal is significantly larger than Metal1 or 2 to Metal3. As more and more developers go through the effort to adopt Metal, the adoption of Metal upgrades will accelerate.

 

[StellarVixen]

You should be thankful that developers are even using Metal, let alone if they are gonna use Metal 2 or 3, considering how niche the Mac OS as a gaming platform is.

I think one of the worst mistakes that Apple did was ditching OpenGL completely in hopes that it will "force" people to adopt Metal instead. I think they shot themselves in the foot here. But depending on how much do they care about the gaming on Mac at all, maybe they are not stressed over it that much.

 

[ondioline]

I think one of the worst mistakes that Apple did was ditching OpenGL completely in hopes that it will "force" people to adopt Metal instead.

I mean, this is the Khronos group’s strategy as well. There hasn’t been a single stable release of OpenGL after Vulkan 1.1 came out in 2018.

 

[Earl Urley]

It's not an instantaneous performance gain just by updating to Ventura. Developers need to adopt Metal 3 in their apps. But the gains are for every device that support Metal 3, not only for Apple Silicon Macs.

And here are all the GPUs that support Metal 3, see attached:

Basically, if your machine is at least a 2017 model, you can run Metal 3. But definitely would wonder who'd want to buy an Intel Mac Pro, as that's literally the only Mac model capable of accepting an AMD 6000 series GPU..

 

[Frantisekj]

Is there any simple demo that would show improvements made by Metal 3 already? By someone other then Apple?